It isn’t enough to bring up children happy and secure; you’ve got to have a decent world for them. Dr Benjamin Spock
I urge parents not to be intimidated by the rule that had existed in paediatrics at the time – you must never feed a baby off schedule. Dr Benjamin Spock
All parents want is to be treated with a little respect. Dr Benjamin Spock, BBC Tonight
Later Spock wrote a book – Baby and Child Care – which changed for ever the way we relate to our children. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3: Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
With his straight talking charm, Spock was a natural broadcaster and he understood the power of television. ibid.
For Spock’s generation society could be cured by improving the way parents bring up children. ibid.
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day. John Milton, Paradise Regained 4:220
If we have to have an exam at 11, let us make it one for humour, sincerity, imagination, character – and where is the examiner who could test such qualities? A S Neill, letter to Daily Telegraph 1973
If you bungle raising your children I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
He’s not going to attack children, is he? Yes he is … Your children are overrated and overvalued. George Carlin, You Are All Diseased, HBO 1999
Every child is clearly not special. George Carlin
At what age do you go from being special to being not so special? George Carlin
All this ignorant bullshit you have to listen to about children … Your children are overrated and over valued, and you’ve turned them into little cult objects … John Wayne Gacy loved his children, yes he did, kept them all right out in the yard near the garage … Most of them are rather unpleasant. George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty audio
Woody: How old are you, darling? How are you? How old are you?
Child: Twelve.
Woody: Are you married? Broadway Danny Rose 1984 starring Woody Allen & Mia Farrow & Nick Apollo Forte & Sandy Baron & Gloria Parker et al, director Woody Allen, Wood Allen to child at table
I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib. Woody Allen
Lords knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember ... By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget. Margaret Drabble, The Millstone, 1965
I am available for children’s parties, by the way. Bill Hicks, Revelations, Dominion Theatre London; viz Bill Hicks, Sane Man
I have had the father feeling for a building, but I never had it for my children. Frank Lloyd Wright
Those lighting devils that go by the wrong name of innocent children. Maeve Binchy, The Copper Beach, 1992
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. William Blake
This film is about a scandal, an unseen scandal where the blame is upon all of us. It concerns thousands of our children who are forced to live deep in the shadows of our society than even those in our prisons. They are the 6,000 mentally handicapped children who live out their lives as long as they are inmates in grim Victorian institutions where they are fed and clothed and left often just to sit in the corner … Most of these children get no education at all. John Pilger, Nobody’s Children, ATV 1975
Cut off, confirmed, dumped in places like this. ibid.
For the first time since the Great Depression, Britain the so-called Welfare State is deliberately cutting back the means of survival of its poorest and their children ... Perhaps the least understood crisis in the last few months has been that more and more impoverished parents can no longer afford to feed their children ... A Child Poverty Action group report last month stated that 5,000,000 men, women and children in Britain now have no more than £1.60 a week to spend on food. John Pilger, Smashing the Kids
Children with faces of angels born all over the shop – Heaven must be having a clearout. esias
There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents. Edna Gladney, American philanthropist
Troubled kids will always find a way to break our hearts. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s2e2: Safety Hysteria, Showtime 2004
What kind of God does that – kills innocent children? Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s2e6: The Bible: Fact or Fiction?
Why did the Pope’s apology smell like bullshit? Because he himself organised the cover-up. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s7e10: Vatican
2005: The pope was granted immunity from liability from any sex-abuse cover-ups in the US by George W Bush. ibid.
Why do paedophiles always have beards and glasses? What is it about that look that children find so sexy? Frankie Boyle, on stage
A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. Groucho Marx
My parents kept me from children who were rough
And who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes. Stephen Spender, poem 1933
He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn’t. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant’s trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt. Paul Foot, re Anthony Chevenix-Trench, housemaster at Shrewsbury
Three children sliding on the ice,
Upon a summer’s day,
As it fell out, they fell in,
The rest they ran away.
Now had these children been at home,
Or sliding on dry ground,
Ten thousand pounds to a penny
They had not all been drowned.
You parents all the children have,
And you that have got none,
If you would have them safe abroad,
Pray keep them safe at home. Anonymous, Thee Children c.1630
It’s all any reasonable child can expect if the dad is present at the conception. Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloan
You’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all we’re not savages. We’re English. And the English are best at everything. So we’ll have lots of rules. William Golding, The Lord of the Flies
Now the villain was to be an even more unlikely figure, one who initially looks like an angel in Paradise. At first sight it would seem an idyllic setting. An island deserted apart from a handful of innocent schoolboys. Yet it was here that William Golding proposed to look evil straight in the face. And that face belonged to perhaps the most shocking villain in British fiction – a twelve-year-old choirboy called Jack Meridew. Faulks on Fiction 4/4: The Villains, BBC 2011
I think Jack [Lord of the Flies] is a fake grown-up. Jack’s a boy enacting the idea of adulthood rather than have become an adult. And what you get then is a caricature of what adulthood is like when Children pretend to be adults. Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst & author
A child should always say what’s true,
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table:
At least as far as he is able. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
Children make you want to start life over. Muhammad Ali
Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter. Francis Bacon, Essays: ‘Of Parents and Children’, 1925
The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears. ibid.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. Elizabeth Bowen
It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Samuel Johnson